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This year the talent screen award was won by the short movie called “Claude” that was produced by a group of you swiss artists and students that have released the movie under the Creative Commons license. The talent screen contest is an award that is organised by the swiss television together with some sponsors. The aim is to offer young producers a possibility to realise a short movie on a proposed topic within 48 hours. This year there were over 100 short movies that were sent to the jury.

The short movie of the winner will be published in the Internet the upcoming days.

Some time ago the Dataformat ODF (Open Document Format), that is specified by oasis was ISO certified (Norm ISO/IEC 26300). (Microsoft is part of oasis but only passively observed the ODF-group and refused an active cooperation). This format is most known in the use of OpenOffice, Abiword und Google Docs, and KOffice. It’s a open, free accessible standard, on which the documentation and specification is accessible and freely applicable. After a short time Microsoft refused to make this format readable and writable for the Microsoft Office Software what caused that some parties, lately also Sun Microsystems himself, have written a Plugin for it. Microsoft recognised the danger and feared a financial break-in and countered with it’s new format for Microsoft Office 2007 (for Microsoft Windows Vista). The Format is called “Office Open XML” and is neither open nor it is XML. This all wouldn’t be so sad, if Microsoft wouldn’t try to certify that format by the ISO Organisation through corrupt connections. So far the strategy of Microsoft was to modify established and standardisised formats, interfaces and protocols so that they work best with their own applications and complicate interoperability between different systems. (e.g. Kerberos, html, smtp and many others).

Anyway oooxml is “Defective by Design” and may not be ISO certified. The process for such a standardisation usually goes through norming and standardisation organisations of the concerned countries. In Germany it’s called DIN (Deutscher Industrie Standart) and in Switzerland SNV (Schweizerische Normen-Vereinigung) that certify such standardisations. In Germany the lately approved certification of the ooxml format is heavily critisised and disputed. In Switzerland the polls took place until Monday morning, the 27. august 2007. Aparently many Swiss banks are members of the SNV Organisation and speak out on behalf of Microsoft. I thought banks might be interested of the fact, that ooxml generates rounding errors in Microsoft Excel.

If you need more information about this topic, don’t hesitate to contact me or Shane M. Coughlan, the coordinator of the FTF (Free Software Foundation) or Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Get ready for the upcoming Bergtagung.org meeting, that is going to take place in the swiss alps this upcoming weekend. Some GNU/Linux nerds, media artists and other creative people are going to meet there for hiking, drinking beer and talking about technocratic topics in a funny, casual atmosphere.

This year, the Linuxtag 2007 is taking place in Berlin. And for the second time, I’m visiting it. It’s fun to meet friends again. Especially at the “social event” that has taken place at the “Umspannwerk in Kreuzberg” this year. The talks and the discussions at the booth’ are very enlightening. Just “Stasi 2.0” founder Wolfgang Schauble is missing. We’d welcome him, by throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes. 😉

The Administration of the State of Zurich in Switzerland still uses the proprietary xls, doc etc. Formats of the MS Office Suite. That’s why each an every worker of the state of Zurich has to write its timetable into a table of such a proprietary file. Today while transfoming my timetable.xls file into a ODF (Open Document Format) file I coincidentally found out that the timetable with its calculations and algorithms still works perfect in Openoffice. And it also does in ISO certified ODF Format we could economise 70% of our storage Servers, that could be used for example for another Free Software project in Malawi. 😉